


Lost to Sight

by mangochi



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Friends, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mention of M'Baku/Others, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-04-20 14:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14262894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangochi/pseuds/mangochi
Summary: “Are you all right?” asks the boy- the prince, M’Baku thinks. Prince T’Challa of Birnin Zana, precious firstborn of the Great Panther. He speaks Xhosa in a gentle, low tone, his white robes finer than anything M’Baku has ever owned, and his fingers against M’Baku’s are soft and smooth. M’Baku stares down at him, furious.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is somewhat inspired by the fact that Black Panther: The Young Prince exists, except that I didn't read it and the only thing I took from it was the premise that M'Baku and T'Challa briefly went to middle school in America together. 
> 
> So I kind of took that and went......ok but what does this mean for the rest of the movie if they already knew each other before and here I am now.

When M’Baku is twelve years old, he finds himself summoned to the throne room, still sweaty and dust-streaked from the training grounds. It is not the first time he has knelt here, but it is the first time he has done so alone. He finds himself suddenly wishing for the familiarity of his brothers.

Lord Adebiyi peers critically at him from the throne, eyebrows drawn low over hawkish eyes, and pronounces him an interesting problem. “Yes, interesting,” he says. “But more problem than not, as you are.”

M’Baku bites back a hot retort. His tongue has gotten him more raps over the head by the training master’s staff than he can count, and Lord Adebiyi has a far sterner hand than Master Idogbe.

“Do you know of the Golden City, M’Baku?”

M’Baku’s head jerks upward in surprise- he did not expect to be addressed by name. Not this early in his candidacy. Lord Adebiyi gives an impatient sigh after a moment, and M’Baku nods quickly. “Yes, my lord.” He knows the stories, of course, like any child born in the mountains. The Golden City, Birnin Zana, so many names for a place he is sure he will never see. The Panther King, glutted on gold that rains from the sky, sitting on a throne of stars.

“The young prince,” says Lord Adebiyi, as if M’Baku has any idea that there is a prince somewhere in Birnin Zana, “will soon be embarking across the ocean. To America.”

M’Baku frowns, slightly nervous now. He wonders if he is meant to have already known all this, if this is some sort of test.

“You will be accompanying him.”

“What!” The word bursts from him, shocked and indignant, and Lord Adebiyi looks resigned.

“Ah, yes. I was wondering if perhaps you had been possessed.”

M’Baku shuffles forward on his knees, his head still reeling. A prince? A savage land across the ocean? If this is a test, he has had enough of it. “My lord, I cannot-”

The end of Lord Adebiyi’s staff strikes the floor of the throne room, ringing out loud enough to send the birch branches around them quivering, and M’Baku’s mouth snaps shut.

“You will do this,” Lord Adebiyi says, and his eyes are knowing and kind, “because it is what I require of you. Become stronger, M’Baku. Become better.”

…………………

The ship lands at the border two days later, and M’Baku watches the ramp descend grimly, his meager possessions clutched tight to his chest. He wears his best clothing and a wooden charm around his neck gifted to him from his shieldbrothers. He can still feel the warmth of their arms around him as he prepares to leave, the round charm pressed into his palm by small, scarred hands.

_“Be safe, brother.”_

_“Come home soon, brother.”_

_“Show that panther prince that he is no better than you, eh?”_

His eyes are only stinging from the dust, he tells himself, as he climbs into the ship. It is dark and alien and foreboding, like the mouth of a great beast. There are tall women all around him that he refuses to look at, ignoring their offers of food, drink, a place to set his bag.

There is a thin buzz of uneasiness threatening to overwhelm him, settling over his skin like a seething blanket, and he doesn’t know where it’s safe to look. He wants to go home, to the exasperated scoldings from Master Idogbe, to the laughter and jostling of his brothers.

They are flying now, he realizes, with a sudden burst of panic. The floor hums strangely beneath his feet, his ears aching, and he cannot remember the ship even leaving the ground. For a moment, he is blindingly dizzy, his back meeting the wall of the ship.

Two hands suddenly find his, small like the hands of his brothers, and he looks into round, dark eyes, wide with concern.

“Are you all right?” asks the boy- the prince, M’Baku thinks. Prince T’Challa of Birnin Zana, precious firstborn of the Great Panther. He speaks Xhosa in a gentle, low tone, his white robes finer than anything M’Baku has ever owned, and his fingers against M’Baku’s are soft and smooth. M’Baku stares down at him, furious.

“I thought you'd be bigger,” M’Baku says flatly. His own Xhosa is crude, but this soft little prince deserves no better. He twists away and huddles in the corner of the ship, his furs drawn tight over his head and his eyes clenched shut. It does not make him miss the earth any less.

…………………

The school’s name is a string of consonants that falls rough and brisk on M’Baku’s ears, and he forgets it almost instantly. There are too many pale-faced men and women, their eyes cold and masked, hands snapping and waving and gesturing. T'Challa is swept along with him, and M’Baku almost reaches out for him, if only to cling to something familiar in this nightmarish landscape.

They are taken to a suite of rooms, bare and minimal, but clean, and left alone there with only a pile of T’Challa’s belongings and a sense of harried inconvenience. M’Baku only recognized a handful of words from the flurry on their way here. Embassy. Wakanda. Program.

“We may pride ourselves in our seclusion,” Master Idogbe once said, “but that does not excuse us from ignorance,” and he proceeded to drill English into M’Baku and his brothers. M’Baku wishes now that he paid more attention.

“How was I to know,” he mutters, dark and angry at his feet. T'Challa shuffles next to him, small and annoying, and M’Baku sniffs loudly, forcing himself to stand taller.

“What manner of training is this?” he demands, the first words he has spoken to T’Challa since the ship. “Do all your kings suffer through such stupid pilgrimages?”

“It isn't stupid.” T'Challa looks nearly wounded. “It is for my education.”

“Education,” M’Baku repeats, incredulous. “From these colonizers.”

“They don't like that word here,” T’Challa cautions. M’Baku could not give less of a damn. “It is more for the...experience. I think,” he adds doubtfully. “Your father must have told you the same?”

M’Baku scoffs. “I have no father,” he says. He jabs a finger at one of the bedrooms. “This one is mine. You have the other.” He leaves T’Challa there standing in front of his suitcases, and he closes his bedroom door behind him. There is a window that overlooks a bare courtyard, the grass thin and patchy from above. The bed is small, but larger than any he has slept on, with sheets tucked so tightly into place that he nearly bounces off when he flings himself upon it.

He lies facedown in the cold pillow, and listens to the quiet footsteps of T’Challa in the hallway.

…………………

In the end, M’Baku adjusts to his new life, because it is required of him. He wears the hated uniform, with its restrictive sleeves and the _pants_ , the damned things. T’Challa tells him to stop tugging at his crotch, the first time he struggles into them, and M’Baku wants to throttle him for bringing them here.

It is not entirely T’Challa’s fault, M’Baku knows that. But he is the only one here for M’Baku to blame, and if wearing a silly outfit for a year will bring him that much closer to taking Lord Adebiyi’s seat, he will do that and more.

It does not mean that he’s happy about it.

The first day, they stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the other children and a man introduces them as visiting exchange students. M’Baku listens carefully this time and learns that all the children here are rich and accustomed to their classmates coming and leaving at the whims of their wealthy family. The two of them are acknowledged with the briefest of passing interests and promptly ignored.

T’Challa is seated two seats ahead in the next row over, his head bowed intently over his books like a good little schoolboy. M’Baku sneers and stares out the window, counts the wispy clouds passing overhead.

The lessons stretch on into the afternoon, and M’Baku’s limbs ache from inactivity. They are released briefly into the courtyard and he itches for a fight, for contact. He satisfies himself with his training stretches, ignoring the curious stares and whispers from the other students. Across the courtyard, T’Challa watches him from the shade, his books stacked in his lap.

“We should spar sometime,” T’Challa suggests that night, when they are back in their rooms. M’Baku’s belly aches from the food here, and he is not in an amicable mood.

“I would snap you like a twig,” he snaps. “Don’t be silly.”

T’Challa shrugs, unoffended. “It’d be good for us, I think. To stay in practice.”

M’Baku makes a dismissive sound and goes to bed.

…………………

It is two nights later when he hears the quiet knock on his door. He is only half asleep when it happens, and he lifts his head warily as the door cracks opens. T’Challa’s slight form hovers in the doorway, dark and hesitant in the shadows.

“M’Baku,” T’Challa whispers. There is something odd in his voice, and M’Baku squints at him, wondering if he is dreaming. “Are you awake?”

“What do you want?” M’Baku asks, too tired to be truly irritated. He rubs at an eye and tries to stifle a yawn. “Scared of the dark?”

T’Challa hesitates a moment, then crosses the room in three quick steps, burrowing his way under M’Baku’s covers. M’Baku is too shocked to stop him, and he lies there, blinking, as T’Challa’s hands find and clutch at M’Baku’s fingers, his round eyes glistening in the moonlight. He’s been crying, M’Baku realizes, his breaths still coming in short hitches. The heir of Wakanda lies tearstained in his bed, and none of his training has ever come close to preparing him for this.

“Do you miss it?” T’Challa asks. He smells familiar, in a way that is unlike anything else here, and M’Baku wonders if it is his clothing, or his soap, or T’Challa himself. He squeezes M’Baku’s hands tighter, as if convincing himself that M’Baku is there, and sniffs. “A year is longer than I expected.”

M’Baku doesn’t know what to say. Of course T’Challa would miss home- he was a prince there, with friends and family and a golden palace. The only family M’Baku has known are his shieldbrothers, all of them unwanted until Lord Adebiyi took them in. He presses back the prickling in his chest and does not allow himself to miss them.

“Go to sleep,” he finally says. He lets T’Challa cling to him, listens to his sniffling as it slowly begins to quiet. It will be easier than trying to dislodge him, and M’Baku is far better at offering tolerance than comfort. “A year will be over before you know it.”

T’Challa falls asleep quickly, and M’Baku lies there long afterwards, listening to the quiet sounds of his breaths. He refuses to think that the warmth of T’Challa’s hands is comforting, his fingers curled slackly around M’Baku’s palms.

When he finally sleeps, he dreams of nothing.

The next morning, he wakes to T’Challa already dressed, prim and neat in his uniform, and his face still slightly damp from washing up. T’Challa tries to greet him as M’Baku passes him in the hall, his own shirt rumpled and untucked, and M’Baku ignores him. He pretends that he doesn’t see the way that T’Challa’s face falls as he closes the bathroom door behind him.

There is no reason, he tells himself, for them to have to like each other.

T'Challa doesn’t knock on his door again, after that night.

…………………

T'Challa makes friends quickly, most of them girls charmed by his soft eyes, his fluent French and Russian. They speak it in the classrooms, in the courtyards, the girls happy to converse in their native tongue and T’Challa always eager to please. M'Baku overhears him practicing his Italian sometimes, muttering to himself behind his bedroom door.

M’Baku’s own English has improved greatly in these past many weeks, but he still has no ear for other languages. They speak it to each other in the classrooms and here in the suite, M’Baku stumbling sometimes over pronunciations while T’Challa patiently waits, sometimes correcting him.

M’Baku often sits in the kitchen and scribbles absently in the margins of his schoolwork, just within earshot of T’Challa’s quiet murmurings. An opera today, M’Baku thinks. The words have a poetic lilt at the end, a certain rhythm in their phrasing.

“M’Baku,” he suddenly hears, and he jerks his head up in surprise. T’Challa stands at the doorway, his back straight and his hands clasped before him. “I’m going to town for the night with some friends. There are fireworks, they say.”

M’Baku stares at him, waiting, and T’Challa blinks a couple of times before continuing, “I thought. Well. You’re welcome to come along, if you are free.”

“Was I invited?” M’Baku asks. He taps his pencil against the table and wonders if T’Challa has noticed that his worksheets remain blank, but for the traditional patterns etched in the corners.

T’Challa hesitates, just a split second, his eyes wide and round.

“Then I won’t go.” M’Baku looks back down, fills in one of the blanks with complete nonsense.

“I am inviting you now,” T’Challa says, persistent. M’Baku is almost impressed; two weeks ago, T’Challa would’ve immediately accepted defeat and left.

“I am not here to make friends,” M’Baku says. He looks directly into T’Challa’s face as he says it, then back down once he registers a pang of hurt in T’Challa’s face. He pretends to engross himself in his work, and after a couple of minutes, he hears T’Challa leave their suite, closing the door quietly behind him.

…………………

There are a couple of classmates who M’Baku eventually accepts into his company. One, a boy named Jules, with a space between his front teeth and a father in the oil trades, and the other a redheaded girl named Delilah with a knack for athletics. They are tolerable, he decides, because they do not ask questions.

At their allotted break times, they kick a ball around in the courtyard, chasing it across the dusty lawn, and M’Baku continues to work on his English. A useless language, he still maintains, but a necessary one for the time being. He is sometimes aware of T’Challa watching him during these times, when he is not swarmed by his own friends.  

He wonders, sometimes, if T’Challa would like to join in, but he never approaches, and M’Baku never asks.

“He’s your friend, right?” Jules asks one day, nodding towards T’Challa in the corner of the courtyard. “He want in? We can make teams.”

“No.” M’Baku sends the ball soaring into the sky with a fierce kick. “A pain,” he says, as it bounces back to earth. “He’s just a pain.”

…………………

He misses Wakanda too. How can he not? It has been months and months, and each day he pretends that he does not ache with distant loss when he spots T’Challa’s dark head bobbing in the distance. The winters are cold here like in the mountains, but drier, and the winds are not friendly like they are back home. He steps outside in his stiff uniform blazer, and he misses the supple leather of his armor, the warmth of his furs around his face.

T’Challa asks him once, curiously, about Jabariland. Filled with fiery pride, M’Baku refuses to tell him anything. Afterwards, he regrets it. He wonders if perhaps it would be easier, if T’Challa knew of his birth as an orphan, his childhood spent training in the palace barracks, jostling with his brothers at the foot of the throne and knowing that one day one of them will sit upon it.

He says none of these things, and the tangled knot that they form in his chest grows and swells with each night. He curls up one night, the taste of bitterness on his tongue, and he dreams of home.

He stands before Lord Adebiyi’s throne, but it is empty. A wind whips through the room, rattles the branches and chills his skin, and they ring out against each other in thin, hollow clacks. The sound is louder than it should be.

One blink, and he is alone. Another blink, and his brothers stand around him silently, the ends of their spears slamming into the floor in one, resounding wave.

He looks into their faces, eager, but he does not recognize them. Their features blur and smear, like ripples dragging across a pond, and he opens his mouth to speak, but their names crumble like ashes in his mouth, and he cannot make a sound.

 _M’Baku_.

Someone says his name, low and urgent. He clenches his eyes shut, and still his faceless brothers linger there, pressing closer. He cannot remember them, though he wears their charm against his skin still. Is it there? He fumbles for his chest, feels the round disk burning into his heart.

A hand tightening on his shoulder, shaking him. A gentle touch stroking hesitantly over his forehead.

_M’Baku._

M’Baku jerks awake, his mouth open and gasping, and he stares into T’Challa’s face, hovering anxiously over his own. He is not in the throne room, surrounded by bone white branches and empty faces. He lies tangled in his sheets, sweating and chilled, in a land that refuses to be anything but foreign even after all this time.

“You were dreaming,” T’Challa says needlessly. He sits on the edge of M’Baku’s bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight, and M’Baku feels almost as if he’s sliding towards him, like a pebble on a slope.

M’Baku licks his lips, tries to speak. His throat is dry and aching, and he wonders if T’Challa was woken by his cries. He doesn’t know what to say, and he makes a small, wretched sound instead.

“Oh.” T’Challa says. He stretches out beside M’Baku, lying on top of the covers, and wraps an arm around his shoulders as if they have always been close friends. “Come on. Come here.”

It is the most they have ever touched. M’Baku stiffens automatically, a noise of protest at the ready, but then T’Challa makes a soothing sound, his hand warm and steady on the back of M’Baku’s head. “Shh, it’s all right, M’Baku,” he murmurs. He is speaking Xhosa, M’Baku realizes. It is the first time he has heard it in months. He relaxes without thinking, presses his forehead into T’Challa’s chest and grasps tentatively at T’Challa’s pajamas. “Shh. I’ll be here.”

 _That’s what I’m afraid of_ , M’Baku wants to say, wants to shout from the rooftops. There are things that he wants no one to see, least of all someone with kind eyes, understanding eyes. M’Baku has no need to be understood.

Suddenly, he thinks back to that night, in the beginning, when T’Challa came to him. He has not allowed himself to wonder before, but he wonders now- if he pulled T’Challa closer then, whispered comforts to him as T’Challa does now, if he did those things and more, what would’ve become of them.

“What did you dream of?” T’Challa murmurs. M’Baku cannot answer. He tightens his grasp on T’Challa’s clothes, feels his knuckles press against soft skin beneath the fabric. T’Challa seems undisturbed by his silence. M’Baku supposes he has had enough time to be used to it.

He falls asleep to the sound of T’Challa’s heartbeat, steady beneath his cheek.

The next day, T’Challa is summoned to the headmistress’ office. An urgent message from his father. T’Challa goes, and he doesn’t come back. Their rooms are bare of his possessions when M’Baku returns from class, his bed as neatly made as the day they first arrived.

He does not see T’Challa again for twenty-two years.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO @kolotwi: for constantly screaming in my Twitter DMs and building the Jabari world to me. This would not be what it is without you.

M’Baku does not allow himself to speak of the year he spent away.

In time, he returns, in a set of new clothes sent along with the royal ship by Lord Adebiyi. He almost expects T’Challa to be waiting on the ship, with his kind eyes and soft hands. T’Challa is not there, and M’Baku is angry with himself for even thinking of it.

He falls back in easily enough with his brothers, all of them grown taller and stronger in his absence, and they shout and laugh and pound on his back with excitement.

“What was it like, M’Baku? Was the food as shitty as-”

“How were the outsiders? Did they look like Master Idogbe said-”

“Tell us about the panther prince, M’Baku.”

M’Baku clenches down hard on the thing still twisting in his chest, turning in on itself again and again until it is indecipherable. “He was small,” he eventually says, and lets his brothers’ laughter surround him.

Lord Adebiyi is pleased to see him return, as pleased as M’Baku has ever seen him, and he settles a hand fondly on M’Baku’s head before dismissing him. M’Baku lifts a hand afterwards, touches the spot, and feels something ache dully in the back of his mind where he refuses to examine.

At night, he lies tangled with his brothers like a pack of puppies, their pallets tugged close enough to overlap and form a large nest of sorts in the center of their sleeping quarters. The sound of snoring and soft breathing fills the room, warm and comforting.

It is nearly jarring to return to this, after a year spent sleeping alone.

 _Ah_ , a small voice whispers, treacherous and insistent in the dark of night, _but you did not always sleep alone._

M’Baku pulls his pillow tight over his head and closes his eyes.

…………………

He grows tall, and he grows quickly. The ache in his bones eases as his limbs lengthen, his frame filling out with the unevenness of youth. He turns sixteen, and his brothers ply him with sweet warm wine and hand-carved gifts. He adds another charm to his necklace, one for each year since his return. There is dancing and feasting, Lord Adebiyi at the head of the table with Master Idogbe at his side, and afterwards, M’Baku finds himself watching a fisherman’s son, one who smiles bright at him in the flickering light of the bonfire and winks his round, soft eyes when he catches M’Baku watching.

He downs the rest of his wine, to the loud drunken cheers of his brothers, and he dances until his feet are bruised.

The wine is hot in his belly, burning in his veins, and he finds himself kissing the fisherman’s son goodbye at the riverside, the dark sky growing pale with the incoming dawn. His mouth is soft, warmer than the wine, and his hands when they stroke fondly at M’Baku’s jaw are strong and rough.

“Stay safe, little lord,” says the fisherman’s son, and in the darkness, his eyes seem to belong to another. It’s a jolting realization, like a punch to his chest, and M’Baku blinks rapidly as he watches the boats disappear downstream.

It has been four years, he thinks suddenly. He sits down on the riverbank, the stones cold and uncomfortable beneath him, and watches the sun rise. He touches his mouth absently, presses his fingertips to his lower lip, and feels his eyes stinging. Only the wine, he tells himself, and he swallows back a wave of hot tears. There is a chasm deep within him, raw at the edges with neglect, and he allows himself to look upon it, to feel the ache of it pulsing through him.

It hurts less sharply than when he was twelve years old, standing alone in an empty bedroom, but it hurts nonetheless.

…………………

There are times when M’Baku finds himself wandering close to the border, and he can make out the dark specks of ships soaring in the distant horizon, too large and awkwardly shaped to be birds. He watches them and remembers the feeling of lifting into the sky, the floor humming gently beneath his feet.

He grows older, and he grows stronger. By the time he is eighteen, it takes both Yele and Bayode, the two oldest of them, to pin him during training.

“What've you been _eating_?” Bayode huffs, flipping onto his feet after another bout. He offers M’Baku a hand up, and M’Baku promptly pulls him back down again. Bayode crashes on top of him with a yelp, and they struggle indignantly for a couple of minutes before rolling apart again.

“Same as you,” says M’Baku, and he picks himself up off the ground. He is the tallest now of all his brothers, the width of his shoulders suggesting his future physique. “Doesn't make me as slow, though.” He dodges the playful swing Bayode aims at his head.

Lord Adebiyi falls ill in M’Baku’s twenty-first year. A heart condition, says the healers, with the best medicine being rest and plenty of it.

Lord Adebiyi does not take the news well.

The bellowing can be heard from the courtyard below, and Master Idogbe does not even flinch. “This is sooner than expected,” he tells them all, lined up somberly before him. “But you have been preparing for this day all your lives.”

 _Not all_ , M’Baku thinks. In his earliest, dimmest memories, he had a father and a mother. A sickness took them, he was told. They went quickly, like the others that the sickness claimed. He was taken to the palace the next day, and Lord Adebiyi folded his arms around him, called him a good child and brought him to his brothers.

No one is surprised when the council vote comes to a final call. M’Baku’s brothers swarm him, jostling excitedly, and he feels the reality of it shifting blurrily around him before slamming into place.

“The youngest Jabari lord, they'll call you,” J’Aku shouts, slapping him on the shoulder.  

Yele pushes J’Aku out of the way, braids swinging. “I've always been your favorite, eh, M’Baku? Say you will make me head of your guard-”

A chorus of protests from the others.

“No fair, Yele, nobody said-”

“You damn traitor, we agreed to wait on it!”

“Yele ate your share of fufu last night, M’Baku, though he _swore_ he-”

M’Baku announces Bayode his head of guard, and the others fall upon him with howls of mock outrage.

…………………

“You will be Lord M’Baku tomorrow, not _today_. Learn to live a little, brother.”

“The festival is open to all the surrounding villages. Nobody will notice a few strangers!”

“Well, ten. Ten strangers. Still, only a few! We can wear masks, like all the others.”

“ _Brother_ , say you will join us.”

In the end, he agrees, because he is young and foolish, and if lords are not allowed to young and foolish, well. He is not one yet.

The festival is lit with carved wooden lanterns and scattered bonfires, like fireflies dotted around the base of the mountains. M’Baku wears a half mask with the flaring nostrils and low brow of a gorilla, and, together with his brothers, they slip in amongst the revelry.

M'Baku eats and drinks deeply, taking anything his brothers press into his hands, until his head is spinning and his feet trip lightly over the ground. He finds himself tripping into a dance, allows his arms to be taken in the circle of others, and they spin and spin dizzily around a bonfire. Somewhere, he hears singing, a joyous strain drifting in and out of focus.

The smell of smoke and fried plantains and sweet flowers is hot and thick in the warm air, filling his senses. The sound of drums and laughter is heavy in his ears, and M’Baku stumbles away briefly behind a tent to find some clear air. He is grinning, he realizes, and he reaches up to pull off his mask, his face hot behind it.

“That's a fine mask,” someone says. He turns, finds another young man beside him, a wreath of red flowers on his head and his painted chest gleaming with sweat. M’Baku recognizes him from the dance, remembers those long bare legs kicking in the dust. The young man gestures towards the mask in M’Baku’s hands, and M’Baku watches the curl of his fingers. “May I?”

M’Baku hesitates, a split second too long, and the young man laughs, lifting his hands in surrender.

“No matter,” he says, easy as the breeze. “I am Tayo.” He has a good voice, M’Baku decides. Soft, yielding. He imagines that voice wrapping around French, Italian, reciting operas behind a wooden door.

 _Fuck_.

Tayo peers at him, leans in close in the darkness. His face is broad and kind, and he looks nothing like how M’Baku thinks a royal would look. He touches a hand to M’Baku’s cheek and guides M’Baku’s face towards the moonlight. M’Baku allows it, a wild reckless heat rolling through him. “And you?” Tayo asks, quiet and curious.

M’Baku kisses him in answer, wraps his hand around Tayo’s wooden necklaces and pulls him close. In the end, it does not matter that he never gives his name. Tayo’s hands are gentle and soft, his mouth even softer, and together they tumble into the shadows, breathless laughter spilling between them.

He wakes the next dawn in a tangle of unfamiliar blankets in an unfamiliar tent, the empty space beside him still warm from Tayo’s body, and Yele slapping panickedly at his face and arms.

“M’Baku,” he hisses. There is a wild streak of chalk across his nose, and M’Baku would laugh if his head isn't splitting open with every movement. “ _M’Baku_ , we are _late._ Master Idogbe will flay us alive.”

“End me,” M’Baku says. There is a red flower on his chest, like the memory of a kiss.

Yele slaps him again. “You cannot be seen like this,” he despairs. “Come, J’Aku has a tonic for you.”

J’Aku’s tonic is painfully bitter and restores his senses. No one comments on the new marks M’Baku wears on his neck and chest, except to suggest doubling up on his paint.

…………………

The ceremony takes place in the gardens of Hanuman, a sprawling lush jungle residing deep in the heart of a mountain. The sky is blue through the overhead crater, birds flying freely in and out of the natural space, and the air within is warm despite the winter chill. The children of Hanuman are there in full force, as many as M’Baku has ever seen. They shuffle peacefully around their watering holes, pale fur gleaming pristinely in the filtered sunlight.

M’Baku stands a step before the line of his brothers, all of them stripped to the waist and painted in white and red. The tribe elders gathered behind them, murmuring quietly amongst themselves.

Lord Adebiyi, draped in flowing ceremonial robes, dips a wooden cup into the crystal clear waters and drinks first from it, then passes it to M’Baku. “M’Baku,” he says, low enough that the elders around them cannot hear. His eyes are not as bright than M’Baku remembers from his youth, but no less piercing. “Know that I am proud of you.”

“Stop that, my lord. You'll make me cry,” M’Baku says, grinning. Master Idogbe stares daggers at him over Lord Adebiyi’s shoulder, and M’Baku winces internally at the scolding they will receive after the ceremony ends. He takes the cup and drains it in one go. The water is startlingly cold, burning down his throat.

Together, they dig a hole in the rich dark earth and plant a new sapling next to Lord Adebiyi’s tree, sprinkle water from the pools on the mound of dirt. M’Baku wonders whose tree will stand next to his, in time. If they too will cross the seas with a panther prince.

That evening, M’Baku sits for the first time on his throne. His head still aches from the sharp knock of Master Idogbe’s staff, as do the heads of all his brothers. Lord Adebiyi stands beside him, an infuriating smile on his face. Except, M’Baku realizes now, he is no longer Lord Adebiyi. Merely the man he was before.

“It's not as comfortable as I thought,” M’Baku says, and Adebiyi throws his head back and laughs, like a cackling raven.

“Good,” Adebiyi says, once he has recovered. “Then you will not grow old and fat sitting on it.”

M’Baku snorts, and he sets his staff across his knees, running a hand over the smooth wood. M’Baku remembers watching Adebiyi twirl and wave the same staff with ease, as if it weighed nothing at all. He hefts it now, and he feels the weight of it through his arms, drawing tight across his chest.

“There, now, boy.” Adebiyi’s hand falls on his shoulder, grips it with a surprising strength, and M’Baku looks up into a fierce grin. “Chin up.”

M’Baku juts his chin up as high as he can manage, and Adebiyi flicks it, fast and sharp.

“You have not changed a bit,” Adebiyi tells him. He would sound exasperated, if he did not sound so fond instead. “It is all right, you know, to speak of what you want.”

“Don't speak nonsense, old man,” M’Baku laughs. He squeezes the staff tight, feels his knuckles creak around it. “I already have everything I could want.”

…………………

The role of Jabari lord, M’Baku soon discovers, leaves him with far more free time than he desires. There is the occasional raid, the odd skirmish, but he finds himself spending his days wandering the palace and city streets more often than not. He finds himself wondering what Adebiyi did with all his time, wonders if he will be laughed at if he asks.

“Away with you!” Yele tells him, with his newfound authority as training master. “You've been in the barracks all week! Don't you have a tribe to run?”

“You are sadly mistaken, brother, if you think I run anything around here,” M’Baku says wryly. He leans against a wooden column, watches the two youngest of his children roll and tussle with each other on a woven mat. “Hayo! Letayi! Have you forgotten what I've said about biting?”

“I do not recall you having any rules about biting,” Yele says, after the children have scrambled away.

“Ahh, well.” M'Baku makes a dismissive sound. Yele watches him, contemplative. Suddenly, he snaps his fingers, grinning.

“What you need,” Yele announces, “is a good fuck.”

“Yele, the children,” M'Baku says mildly, though they are too far away to hear.

Yele lowers his voice to a dramatic whisper, “Come now, brother, just between the two of us. You are too grim these days. My lord.”

M'Baku snorts at the hasty addition. “You used to complain at my jokes.”

“Well, they were not very good, but my _point_ -”

“Good day, Master Yele,” M’Baku says, and he reaches inside his tunic for a bag of candies, flipping it through the air to Yele. “Here. For the children.”

“Think on it, my lord,” Yele calls after him. “Think on it.”

…………………

The king is dead. Long live the king.

M’Baku hears the news through numb ears, tries to ignore the sudden kick of his pulse at the mention of the Golden City. He shifts his grip on his staff, leans his cheek against his palm, and considers the messenger before him. One of the newer of his children, Selasi, a young boy found in the aftermath of a bandit raid. He is all of ten years old with the solemnity of a grandfather, and M’Baku has finally managed to feed him out of the semblance of a scarecrow.

“And the prince?” M’Baku prompts. He manages to keep his tone even, uninterested, and is absurdly proud of himself for it.

Selasi blinks at him, then stares hard up at the ceiling, clearly trying to remember the entirety of the message relayed to him. M’Baku waits, fingers tapping restlessly against his temple.

“Yes, my lord!” Selasi finally says, with evident relief. “The challenge ceremony will be held in two weeks’ time. My lord.”

Two weeks.

Two weeks is no time at all.

He will have to bring it to the ministers, he knows. They will chew on it and debate and bicker, and in the end, they will lay the options before him and he will have to make a choice.

There has not been a challenge day in his living memory, and perhaps not one that the Jabari have attended in even the ministers’ memory. No reason to before, but these are different days now. Darker days, dark enough to threaten even the Golden City beneath its shadow.

Twenty-two years, M’Baku thinks to himself. More than two decades, since the last he saw of T’Challa. There, he thinks, it is not so painful to remember his name. In his mind’s eye, he can barely remember the face of the boy he once knew. What he recalls are fragments, mere impressions of his eyes, his hands, a soft smile.

Softness, he remembers that, too. A prince too soft for his own good.

Twenty-two years is long enough to change anyone. That much, he knows for certain, but still the thought lingers, hateful in its persistence, that perhaps he himself has not changed enough. He feels a small ache, like a bruise that refuses to heal beneath his constant prodding.

“Tell Master Bayode,” he finally begins, and Selasi perks up with nervous attention, eyes wide. M'Baku pauses a moment, hopes it comes off as more dramatic effect and less hesitation. “Tell Master Bayode to call council,” he says. “I have a proposal to make.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the real party's about to start, folks


	3. Chapter 3

They paint themselves at the mouth of the tunnel, chalked hands dragging over bare skin and dusting over their palms to keep their spears from slipping. In the distance, there is muffled cheering and singing, the pounding of drums echoing through the air. A sense of festivity lingers in the air, an atmosphere they are not welcome to, and M’Baku has no desire to be. Certain lines were drawn in the sand centuries ago, and as far as he is concerned, they can remain there.

“You’re quiet,” Yele says, suspicious. “You’re never quiet.”

“It’s a serious day.” M’Baku slides his mask down over his face. He feels better this way, looking out at the world through carved eyes. “How do I look?”

Yele reaches out to adjust the mask, then pounds a fist against his chest and grins. “Like a proper savage.”

“Good.” That is what they will be expecting to see, after all, the Golden Tribe and all the others. He sees no reason to disappoint them. “Brothers!” He raises his voice, lifts his spear in the air, and they echo the call. He grins at them, feels his chest swell at the returning flashes of their teeth, the brimming confidence in their eyes. “Today, we make our family proud.”

For their sake, he will do this. For his tribe, for his country. For _himself_. Twenty-two years, he thinks, is too damn long to linger on the ghost of a memory.

…………………

The sun is blinding in his eyes after the darkness of the tunnel, cool water splashing around his legs. The stone underfoot is oddly rough, less slick than he expects, and it is almost enough to distract him from T’Challa.

T’Challa, who stands before him, quiet and guarded, and M’Baku cannot look away.

Fuck, how could M’Baku think he could forget this, forget _him_. T'Challa is grown now, yes, they both are, but his eyes have not changed. They look at M’Baku now, solemn and round and bright, and M’Baku feels his chest begin to crack open, like a castle besieged.

 _“I thought you’d be bigger."_  

It is easier than he expects, to fall now into the role carved out for him. Here, he is looked upon with fear, with disdain, the tribes stirring uneasily on the cliffs above him. He can play the part of a brute, if that is what they wish to see. He feels T’Challa’s eyes on him, and he looks back, satisfied by how far T’Challa has to lift his chin to meet his gaze. That much has not changed, either.

They circle each other warily. With their masks, it is easy enough to pretend they are strangers.

He lands the first blow, a grim thrill running through him when T'Challa falls back. They clash together again, and M’Baku digs his toes into the rough stone, refusing to yield.

T'Challa finally falls first, dazed and panting, his back heaving as M’Baku circles around him.

“Stand up!” M’Baku shouts. He has not come all this way for _this_ , a king so weak he cannot stand on his own feet.

T’Challa surfaces, gasping, his mask knocked free, and M’Baku surges forward, determined to finish this. Would T’Challa kneel before him, he suddenly wonders, if he loses this fight? No, no, he would never do so. M’Baku would have to take his life to see this through.

If he falters slightly in his advance, it is without his knowing.

When T’Challa finally lurches to his feet, it is to swing a fist at M’Baku’s jaw. He’s caught by surprise, feels his teeth cut into the inside of his cheek as he staggers back. He tastes iron, heavy on his tongue, and reality sharpens painfully around him.

His height and weight lend an advantage, and he catches T’Challa around the waist, lifts him up to remove his leverage against the ground. T'Challa twists and struggles in his arms, and M’Baku is not expecting the slam to his face, his mask cracking and splitting.

The sun is painfully bright as he blinks into it, his head throbbing, and there is a sharp ringing in his ears. Warm wetness briefly obscures his vision, stinging in his eyes. He touches his fingertips to his face and blinks down at the smear of red that comes away, shocked.

Battle rage seizes him, blind and hot, and T’Challa staggers back under the impact of M’Baku’s spear, his fingers curling around the shaft as his feet skid back. Blood drips down his chest, mingling with the water there and trickling down his torso. For a split second, M’Baku is frozen, his stomach giving a sickening twist when T’Challa wrenches the spearhead from his shoulder, a new fire in his eyes.

T’Challa wrestles him into a chokehold, his hand tucked above the crook of M’Baku’s elbow and pinning his arm in place, his knee hooking tight around M’Baku’s throat. They are hanging dangerously close to the edge of the falls; he can hear it inches away, can feel the strain of T’Challa’s body against him as he struggles to keep them both in place.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks, with every ounce of his being. Blood and sweat sting in his eyes, his mouth hot and aching. He tries to draw air and cannot, his heart pounding like a jackrabbit in the cage of his chest.

“Yield!” T’Challa shouts. His voice is almost distinguishable from the rushing waters, the sounds of their struggling. M’Baku has seen avalanches before, sheets of snow sloughing away and peeling down the mountain in a roaring rush. He feels caught in one now, the pounding of his blood rumbling and overwhelming in his ears, the earth shaking beneath him.

“I’d rather die!” M’Baku snarls back, and for a moment, he considers struggling to the end, wonders if T’Challa will let him go, if he will let M’Baku wash away over the falls and forget him there. If T’Challa even remembers enough of him to forget. T’Challa is saying something else, but he cannot hear, even if he wished to.

His vision is blurring, focus dissipating, and through the haze, he can barely make out the faces of his brothers around him. He once had a dream like this, he recalls. Years and years upon years ago, in a land far away.

“Your people need you,” he barely hears. T’Challa’s leg tightens around his chest, his throat, the weight keeping him from drawing breath. “ _Yield_ , man!” T’Challa demands, authority heavy in his tone, and M’Baku closes his eyes. There is something of a plea there, if he did not imagine it, in the way T’Challa’s voice shakes as he keeps them both perilously at the edge of death.

Adebiyi would kill him, he thinks suddenly, if he died like this. Choked out by his adversary’s thighs, as if it is not embarrassing enough that even now, M’Baku can remember the last time he and T’Challa were this close together, two children hiding together from a world they did not yet know.

In the end, it is almost a relief. His hand comes into contact with T’Challa’s skin, and he surrenders with a pained groan, hot with shame and disappointment.

The first gasp of air is painful and sweet, his breath coming in a harsh wheeze as T’Challa releases him and rolls free, tipping the both of them onto the safety of solid ground.  

T'Challa does not look back at him, and M’Baku thinks that too is fitting. He stands with his brothers at the edge of the falls, the taste of blood and defeat lingering on his tongue.

He was wrong, he realizes now. There was nothing soft about the strength that pinned him to the edge of life, the raw determination in T’Challa’s voice as he demanded submission. This is not the boy he once knew.

His chest clenches, like a tight fist around his heart.

“Let’s go home, brother,” Bayode mutters, low in his ear beneath the cheers still ringing out from the cliffs. M’Baku nods, a stiff jerk of his head, and they slip away quietly under the cover of the celebration ringing out around them.

…………………

Adebiyi spends most of his days in the gardens now, wandering the narrow trails or lounging peacefully with the children of Hanuman in sunlit clearings. Old Master Idogbe is never far behind, and M’Baku encounters him first at the mouth of the gardens when he returns from the lowlands, carefully pruning a prickly vine from a mango tree.

“He’s at the pools,” Idogbe says, and he raises a brow at the swollen cut on M’Baku’s brow. “You should have that looked at.”

“It’s been looked at,” M’Baku says shortly. It is true, to some extent. None of his brothers are particularly gifted in the healing arts, and he suspects it now looks worse than it did before. He stomps the snow from his boots, watches it melt against the warm soil as he moves deeper within the gardens.

Sure enough, he finds Adebiyi lounging in the clear, cool pools at the heart of the garden, the high, smooth tree roots creating perfect vessels between them. There is a child of Hanuman at his side, delicately sorting through a pile of fruit with dark, leathery fingers, and Adebiyi leans against its silvery arm, eyes closed.

“Don’t drown in your sleep, old man,” M’Baku says, picking his way down towards them. “I'll never let you live it down.” The earth is soft and damp here, slipping beneath his feet.

“Are you king of Wakanda yet, boy?” Adebiyi responds, his eyes still closed. When M’Baku doesn’t reply, he opens them, and lifts his eyebrows in an eerie approximation of Idogbe’s. “You should-”

“-have it looked at. Yes, yes.” M’Baku crouches by the pool, dips a hand inside and stirs the water around pensively. “The king has a hard head. As expected.”

Adebiyi snorts, a distinctly undignified sound that causes the gorilla behind him to grunt in annoyance. “Takes one to know one.” He eyes M’Baku, more serious now. “So. You lost.”

M'Baku exhales in a harsh huff, sitting down heavily. “Perhaps,” he mutters, reluctant to answer.

Adebiyi’s hand, cool and damp, grips his knee and gives it a fortifying shake. “You fought with honor. You lost with honor. What else matters?”

“How do you know?” M’Baku counters. “You weren’t there.”

“But I know you,” Adebiyi says. He squeezes M’Baku’s knee, his hand thinner now with age, but no weaker for it. “Did you make a good entrance?”

“It will not be easily forgotten.” That much, M’Baku is certain of.

“Then it was a good fight.” Adebiyi settles deeper into the pool with a content sigh, his eyes closing again. “Now, come. Tell me of Birnin Zana. It is not every day that a Jabari finds himself in the Golden City.”

…………………

“Ach, I still say you could've won.” Elder Teehani grumbles. She shakes her old head, her large wooden earrings swinging, and squints at M’Baku suspiciously. They sit together on an open balcony, M’Baku shelling peas into a large bowl between his knees under her watchful eye. “You weren't going easy, were you, boy?”

Jabari lord he may be now, but he will forever be only a boy to his ministers. Adebiyi warned him as much, in the beginning. Two days after his return from the capital, and they have nagged him one by one, all of them over twice his age and not eager to let him forget it quickly.

“I would never.” M’Baku asks, lifting his eyebrows. His hands are cramping from the tedious work, and he leans back in his wicker seat, rolling his wrists. “Do you think me gone soft, Elder?”

Teehani barks out a laugh, hoarse and coughing. “Ah, you are every inch Adebiyi’s boy,” she says. “Answering questions with another, around and around like a damn parrot.”

“One throne is enough for me,” M’Baku says simply. He picks up another pod and splits it open, drops the peas carefully into his bowl. “Perhaps this is for the best.”

Teehani sniffs. “ _Every_ inch Adebiyi’s boy,” she repeats. “You lack the _imagination_.”

M’Baku points a finger at her. “If you are so hungry for power, perhaps you fight in the next challenge, eh?” It is almost worth getting his finger smacked with the tip of her cane.

He finishes the bowl and is promptly presented with a basket of dripping mussels. By the time he escapes, the sky is darkening and his breath is frosted white in the lamplight.

The Jabari elders reside in large, communal quarters between the palace and the gardens, connected by narrow steps etched along the sheer cliff walls. High above, he can make out the silhouettes of the large mountain goats populating this region, perched impossibly on the smallest of footholds. M’Baku has just begun the precarious trek down to the main path when he hears hasty footsteps approaching, unsteady with urgency.

“Lord M’Baku, Lord-” Hayo crashes into him and clings tight, like the golden-furred monkeys in the lowlands.

M’Baku blinks down at him, bemused, and drops a hand down on Hayo’s head, shaking it gently. “Something wrong? You in trouble with Master Yele?”

“There’s a man,” Hayo blurts, tipping his head back and staring up at M’Baku wide-eyed. “At the gates. Bayode said to bring you quick.”

“Mm, a man?” M’Baku rubs Hayo’s head until the child squeaks with indignance, trying to think. The elders from the neighbouring mountain villages are not due for another month, and it is too late in the day for the usual business. “Big man? Little man?”

“Bayode said _quick,_ ” Hayo complains, tugging at his skirt. “He’s got a cart.”

“Bayode?”

“The _man_.” Hayo is vibrating with impatience, hopping from one foot to the next. “He smells like fish,” he says conspiratorially, and M’Baku’s hand stills on his head.

When M’Baku was sixteen, he kissed the son of a fisherman. He remembers kissing him on occasions after that, until they grew out of such things, and Akande found himself happily married with a life on his father’s boat. They are friends now, in a way that only such a history can produce, and M’Baku often sees him on market days, his wife at his side and two young children at his ankles.

Akande is there at the gates with Bayode and a handful of his guards, snow dusting his thick beard. He touches his fist to his chest as M’Baku approaches, Hayo hanging from his back. Hayo did not fabricate the cart, M’Baku sees. There’s an odd sense of tension in the air, not quite apprehension, not quite anticipation. A moment of pivotal importance, some teetering balance swaying in the air.

“My lord,” Bayode says, with a nod, then plucks Hayo from him and tucks him under an arm. “Thought you’d like to see this.”

“I found him in the reeds downstream,” Akande says, gesturing at a tangle of blankets on his cart, buried between piles of nets and woven mats. “I did not know where else to bring him.”

M'Baku moves forward, glances over the edge of the cart, and finds himself looking down at the last person he expects to see.

T'Challa is barely recognizable, his face drawn and gaunt, battered with bruises and scrapes. For a stark, terrifying moment, M’Baku thinks that he is dead. His chest goes cold, his balance reeling, and he clutches tight at the side of the cart.

“He is alive,” he hears Akande, dim and distant through the pounding in his ears. His heart races in his chest, a painful rhythm beneath his bones, and he stares down into T’Challa’s face, waiting for the confirmation of a frozen cloud to mark his breath. “But just barely. I thought perhaps...the palace healers…”

“Take him to the temple,” M’Baku says. His voice is strange to his own ears, and he does not miss Bayode’s questioning glance. He uncurls his fingers from the cart and forces himself to step away.

Akande watches as the cart is wheeled away by the other guards, concern and relief evident in the way he plucks at his cloak. “He is the king, no?” he asks suddenly, turning his eyes to M’Baku. They are more lined with weather and age than they were as a boy, but still familiar and knowing. “I visit the capital on occasion. For trade. I have seen his face there.”

“He is the king,” M’Baku confirms, though his gut tightens uneasily. He knows where the river washes from, has stood above those falls himself merely days ago. _You should not have lost to anyone but me,_ he thinks. He manages a small smile, clapping a hand on Akande’s shoulder. “Stay for a meal,” he says.

“A kind offer, my lord, but I should return.” Akande smiles, his face softening with wonder. “My wife is expecting me.”

It is an awkward thing, M’Baku reflects, to be a third party at a time like this. “She is...ah,” he mimes the shape of a growing belly with his hands. “Doing well?”

“Another daughter, Hanuman willing.” Akande grins at him, and M’Baku feels some of his tension seep away, melting like the snowflakes on his skin.

He makes his farewells to Akande and falls into step with Bayode, Hayo clinging determinedly to his shoulders. “Take this little monkey back to Yele,” he says, ignoring Hayo’s squawks of protest in his ear. “I have business in the temple.”

…………………

“He is stabilized,” the head shaman tells him, through the heavy wrap around their head and mouth. The shamans are quiet and reclusive by nature, but C’Ethana has always been the most vocal of them, despite taking the mantle at their young age. “It is the best we can do.”

M’Baku gazes down at T’Challa, buried waist deep in a bed of glittering snow, and lets the verdict wash over him. He is calm by the end of it, his hands clasped around his staff. “And what of treatment?” he asks. He can just make out the extent of T’Challa’s injuries beneath the snow, his beard and eyelashes frosted with healing ice, but he knows the height of those falls. Knows what a miracle it is that T’Challa even still breathes before him.

C’Ethana blinks slowly at him, and there is a stir of movement beneath their shapeless robes. A small, thin hand emerges, pats M’Baku’s knuckles gently with dry fingertips. “Perhaps we should send word to the capital?”

“That is not our way,” M’Baku mutters, but with less conviction than he might have in the past. The Jabari way, after all, has no precursor for a situation like this. In the flickering torchlight, T’Challa almost looks as if he is merely asleep. M’Baku takes C’Ethana’s hand blindly when they offer it, and they squeeze his fingers in silent acknowledgment.

“Then your prayers will have to do.” Together they look down at T’Challa, and M’Baku tells himself it is not a tomb that T’Challa lies in. “We will do our best for him, my lord,” C’Ethana continue, not kindly. “Hanuman will provide.”

“Hanuman will provide,” M’Baku echoes, a moment later. He hopes that it is enough.

…………………

Hanuman, M’Baku thinks, has a shit sense of humor. He looks down on the heads of the Queen Mother and the princess, the River Tribe War Dog who cradles a miracle in her palms, and he cannot bring himself to laugh at this twisting of fate.

“Come with me,” he says, and they follow.  

It does not feel right to be witness to what follows, to the summoning of a god not his own. His skin prickles, itching beneath his clothing, and he turns away to stare out at the swirling snow. The small mousy pest shuffles awkwardly alongside him, and M’Baku glares until he follows suit. Some sights are not meant to witnessed by undeserving eyes.

Behind him, he hears the low murmur of prayers, of pleas. He catches T’Challa’s name, soft and affectionate, and wonders if this River Tribe woman would be his queen. She would be a good one, with all the blazing force and compassion of a flame. Strong enough to lead, gentle enough to suit T-

There is a gasp, loud and straining, and when M’Baku turns, he sees T’Challa sitting up, buried in a pile of embraces. Relief crashes over him in an unexpected rush, and M’Baku grips his staff tight, exhaling heavily. He is not dead. He is there before M’Baku’s eyes now, breathing and laughing and flushed with life.

T'Challa looks up then, their eyes meeting over the heads of his mother and sister. M'Baku is startled into holding his gaze, his jaw tight as he watches recognition flood T’Challa’s face.

“M’Baku,” T'Challa says. His mouth curves in a soft smile, warm and grateful. The ice in his hair has melted, gleaming damply on his skin. M'Baku finds himself staring, and he looks down with a grunt, uneasy for reasons he has no desire to bring to light.

“Someone get this man a blanket,” he says, gesturing at the shamans gathered to the side. “And you.” He glances back at T’Challa, suddenly reluctant to meet that warm gaze. “Welcome back to the living.”

…………………

In hindsight, he should have expected to be dragged headfirst into this. Centuries of solitude, and now he is plagued by the entire royal family.

“I could use an army, as well,” T’Challa tells him, after a beat of hesitation. His mouth curves slightly, his eyes glancing up through his eyelashes, and M’Baku stares openly, wondering if this sudden coquettishness is intentional. The T’Challa in his distant memory would not have done such a thing, much less so effectively. For a moment, he finds himself struggling to decide if he likes it.

“I'm sure you could,” he finally says, bares his teeth in a grin. _This,_ he knows he likes, watching the way T’Challa is unable to resist rising to a challenge. T’Challa nearly responds. M’Baku can see it in the way his lips part, his eyes growing bright, and he is almost disappointed when T’Challa swallows it back.

“I looked for you,” T’Challa says instead, “after the challenge. You were not there.”

“Did you now.” M’Baku feigns disinterest, tapping his fingers on the armrest of his throne. “And why should I have been?”

“You left.” T’Challa looks almost wounded by this. He is altogether too good at looking like that, M’Baku thinks. It is dangerously effective, and M’Baku looks away.

“As should you,” he says brusquely. “Don’t you have a king to depose?”

There is a long pause, and M’Baku begins feeling uncomfortably warm around his neck. He shoves the feeling aside and looks back up at T’Challa, jutting his chin out pointedly towards the doors. “There it is. Can't miss it.”

T’Challa blinks once, slow and considering, and he finally takes a step backwards. His necklace catches the sunlight, a brief flash of vibranium that shines brighter than snow. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he says, “Lord M’Baku.” There are years of practiced diplomacy in the way he tilts his head, the way his eyes linger on M’Baku before he turns and strides away.

“Woof,” Bayode says quietly by the door, in the ringing silence that follows.

M'Baku points at him warningly. “Don't start,” he says. His head is beginning to ache. He sits for a moment, unmoving, glaring at the empty space on the floor where T’Challa stood. “Fuck,” he mutters, fervently and with great feeling. “Bayode!”

“Yes, my lord.” Bayode drawls it out, insufferably smug. “I'll let the troops know immediately, my lord.”

“Give it a minute,” M’Baku says. Smugness, he suspects, would look absolutely infuriating on T’Challa.

Ramonda is waiting for him in the hall, her blanket pulled tight around her. She rises to her feet as he approaches, drawing herself up to her full height. “You say you will not go?” she demands, regal to the core. M'Baku ignores her, striding down the hall, and she sweeps alongside him, matching his strides admirably. “You would save my son, save your _king,_ and yet in your country’s greatest time of need-”

“Calm yourself, Queen Mother,” M’Baku says, waving a hand. “Honestly, you are just like him.” Passionate, honorable. Unbearably righteous. He reaches his chambers, gestures impatiently at the guards there when they tense at the sight Ramonda charging behind him, and pushes the doors open. They swing apart easily at his touch, carved wood gliding silently across the floor. His armor awaits him against the far wall, the wood polished and gleaming gently in the lamplight.

“You will be safe here in my land,” M’Baku says, turning back to Ramonda. “I gave my word to your son.” She stands at the door, understanding spreading swiftly across her face, and he supposes she is not the Queen Mother for nothing. He will have her escorted to Adebiyi and Idogbe, he decides, and allow them to talk her ear off. They will be glad for the company, if nothing else.

“And you?”

“Me? What of me? I am nothing of your concern.” He crosses the room to his armor, runs a hand across the carved wooden breastplate and traces the lines etched across it.

“I remember you,” Ramonda says, after a moment. “You were sent away with T’Challa, all those years ago.” M’Baku stiffens, but does not turn. He hears her approach from behind, with all the burning determination of her son. Perhaps this is who he learned it from. “Did you think I would forget? To think that little boy would become Jabari lord so soon.”

M'Baku bends to strap on one shin guard, then the other, focusing on the feel of the soft fastenings in his fingers as he tightens them. “I was not kind to him,” he finally says. It prickles within him, even now, an itch that he cannot seem to bury beneath the years that have passed since. “Did you know that?”

“Children are often unkind.” There is an understanding in her voice that he finds mortifying.

T'Challa was kind, as a child. It is still in him now, almost frustratingly so.

“He still regrets leaving, you know,” Ramonda continues, when he says nothing, and M’Baku’s fingers slip on his armor. He can feel her eyes on him, watching him with a scrutiny not unlike the piercing attention of his ministers. “It was not his fault, of course,” Ramonda continues. “My husband’s brother vanished, and T’Chaka feared the worst. He thought the family should be together. Of course,” she adds, and there is a weary edge in her tone now, “he did not vanish at all.”

There is a story there, M’Baku thinks, that he doesn’t have the time to hear now. He finally remembers how to move and fiddles with his breastplate, adjusting the straps needlessly. The reason for T’Challa’s disappearance is a less momentous revelation than he thought. He wonders, if he knew then, if he would have understood. Family, after all, is not something to be taken lightly.

Would it have mattered, if he knew this before? He barely knows if it matters now. It would not have changed reality, merely his perception of it. T’Challa would still have been a world away, at the end of the day. Still a prince, still kind, different from M’Baku in every way.

“Lord M’Baku,” Ramonda calls out, when he begins striding back down the hall. He turns, his staff resting against his shoulder, and sees her standing alone in his chambers, looking suddenly smaller and older in the distance.

“Go with the blessings of your god,” she tells him gravely, “and know that you go with ours.”

By the sound of this war he is about to plunge himself in, M’Baku thinks, he will need much more than that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was only going to be one more chapter of this, but it’s looking to be really long so maybe it will be two.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAD TO BREAK THIS ONE UP INTO TWO CHAPTERS OOPS, so here is the first one.

T’Challa is recrowned at sunrise. It is a somber, private affair, the cliffs empty of revelers and the waters tinged red by the fiery sky. The Queen Mother and the princess are there, the elders and Dora Milaje gathered around them. M’Baku stands to the side, looking down at T’Challa kneeling in the water below, and wonders if this is how Wakanda saw him, that day that he fought T’Challa on these falls.

Afterwards, T’Challa wades towards him, determination bright in his eyes. “M’Baku,” he says. ”I owe you my gratitude. For accepting the council seat.” Standing in the water, he has to tip his head far back to look M’Baku in the face, and M’Baku finds his gaze drifting downwards before he catches himself.

“Save it,” M’Baku mutters. He glances around at the others, still watching him with centuries of wariness, and straightens his back. Let them see him stand tall, unafraid. “Don’t let me keep you. My king.”

T’Challa merely looks amused, to M’Baku’s great annoyance, and he holds out a hand. His ring gleams on his smallest finger, the metal heavy and dark. After a moment of hesitation, M’Baku reaches out and they grip each other’s forearms. T’Challa’s skin is warm, nearly hot, and M’Baku is startled enough to hold on a moment too long for propriety.

“I’ll be seeing you,” T’Challa says, when they step away again. A casual farewell, from anyone else, but his eyes speak of nothing but warm promise.

…………………

M’Baku receives the summons as he watches Hayo and Letayi practice their forms. Selasi sits beside him, a year behind in his training despite being a year older than the twins, and fidgets when he thinks M’Baku is not watching.

“Elder Teehani?” M’Baku raises his eyebrows, and Bayode shrugs. It is far too early in the day for her usual demands. M’Baku frowns. “Did she say-”

“Does she ever?”

“He’s leaving!” Hayo protests suddenly, legs wobbling as he holds the fourth stance. “But you said you would watch, my lord-” he yelps as Yele raps the back of his head with his staff, and M’Baku leaves the courtyard with an apologetic wave.

He finds Teehani sitting with her wife, Yoona, at their kitchen table. Beside them, T’Challa sits, his cheeks full of sweet fried taro, ankles crossed delicately and Teehani’s hand in his own.

“Ah, M’Baku,” T’Challa says, his eyes brightening when M’Baku strides closer. He straightens with a last pat to Teehani’s hand, his smile nearly blinding. “I was just wondering if you were away. Your advisors convinced me to wait a little longer.”

His Yoruba is flawless. Then again, he has always had a gifted tongue. Both Teehani and Yoona, M’Baku can tell, are already helplessly charmed. Who can blame them, he wonders, disgruntled. T’Challa is the dream of every aging grandmother in the nation.

“What is he doing here?” he asks, ignoring T’Challa.

“I thought I said,” T’Challa says mildly. “I wished to extend an invitation for the Jabari to join the tribal council.”

“You know nothing of the Jabari,” M’Baku snaps. “You have no right to extend anything.” He feels...unsettled, in a way he is not familiar with. T’Challa sits there smiling, pleasant and gentle, and M’Baku is torn between fascination and annoyance. “And you didn’t. Say. I have no memory of you...saying…” He is swiftly losing track of his thoughts, like a ball of yarn tumbling down the mountainside.

“My lord,” Teehani says, dry and barbed. “You forget your manners.”

“No, no.” T’Challa holds up a hand. “You are correct. I am unfamiliar with your ways.”

“There, you see? The king himself admits it,” M’Baku declares, somewhat deflated by how easily T’Challa has given in.

“My _lord_ ,” Teehani repeats, nearly pointed enough to make M’Baku wince, “the king would benefit from a guide, if he is to know our ways.”

“If you absolutely insist,” M’Baku says. “I’ll fetch one right away.”

Teehani clears her throat, dry and commanding, and M’Baku barely contains a sigh of defeat.

“It would be my honor,” he says, and he forces the corners of his mouth downward when T’Challa beams.

…………………

T’Challa is content, that first day, with a cursory tour of the temples. He clasps the hands of C’Ethana and touches his forehead to their thin fingers. They touch his cheek and smile, eyes sliding past his bowed head to M’Baku. M’Baku shifts his weight to his other foot and looks away. He does not pretend to know the maddening ways of his shamans, only that they say less than they need and mean more than they say, and there is something altogether too knowing in C’Ethana’s gaze.

“Thank you,” T’Challa says earnestly, when M’Baku returns him to his ship. “It was an enlightening experience. I wonder if perhaps we could arrange a meeting between our spiritual leaders, it could potentially-”

“It’s late,” M’Baku interrupts, though the sun has barely dipped beneath the mountain peaks. “Another time.” He feels jarred, has felt this way since he laid eyes on T’Challa at his ministers’ table, so comfortable in M’Baku’s domain. The sooner he is gone, the sooner everything can return to their normal state. T’Challa in his golden palace, and M’Baku in his.

T’Challa’s hand twitches at his side, as if he means to grasp at M’Baku’s wrist. M’Baku crosses his arms over his chest and draws himself up.

A moment passes, and T’Challa’s hand smooths restlessly over the fabric of his robes. M’Baku pretends not to notice. “Next time,” T’Challa says. “Will you guide me through your city?”

“I am a very busy man.” M’Baku glares. T’Challa remains unfazed.

“Then when you are less busy?”

M’Baku sighs. He looks up at the sky, then down at the ground. “Perhaps,” he concedes. He feels as if he has been somehow defeated, but the bitterness of a loss does not come.

…………………

“You needn’t look so displeased,” T’Challa says mildly. “I did make sure your schedule was clear.” He steps off the ramp of his new sleek ship, and M’Baku reluctantly waves back the circle of guards that gathered in alarm when the vehicle shimmered into view at the palace gates.

“The Jabari lord has no _schedule_.”

T’Challa ignores him. “I’ve brought you something.” He reaches into the folds of his robes, and M’Baku hastily wards off his restless guards again. Careless, he thinks irritably. Too damn careless.

”Here,” T’Challa says brightly, and he holds out a small round fruit. It is dark and smooth, the skin shiny and firm, and M’Baku finds himself at a loss.

“What is that?” he finally asks, when T’Challa only looks at him.

“A plum.” T’Challa tosses the fruit to him, and M’Baku squints down at it suspiciously. “Don’t look at it like that, do you think I’ve poisoned it?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” M’Baku says haughtily. “I am only concerned that it is disgusting.”

“Would I give you something like that?” T’Challa looks faintly aggrieved. A satisfying look on him, M’Baku reflects. “Try it, then, and see for yourself.”

Curiosity, in the end, wins out. M’Baku bites warily into the fruit, the skin resisting briefly before giving way with a soft burst. The flesh is sweet, cool, with a burst of tartness from the skin, and he makes a noise of pleasant surprise.

“Ah, you’ve fallen for my devious trap. Your throne is mine,” T’Challa says dryly.

Juice drips down M’Baku’s chin as he takes a larger bite, and he pushes his mouthful into one cheek. “Don’t be facetious.” He thumbs at his chin and licks it clean, then rolls his eyes skyward when T’Challa’s expression shifts oddly. If T’Challa is expecting anything resembling table manners from him, he has even more to learn about the Jabari than M’Baku thought possible.

“Come along, then,” M’Baku says, afterwards. He palms the pit of the fruit and tucks it away when T’Challa isn’t looking. Perhaps it will take root in the gardens. “I hope you don’t mind heights.”

…………………

T’Challa is impressed by, of all things, the swaying bridges that span the levels of the city. He runs his hands over the thick woven cords, bends low to examine the wooden planks underfoot. “Remarkable!” he tells M’Baku, childishly excited as they cross a ravine to the marketplace. “This wood shows no sign of weathering, and you say they have been here since the establishment of the city?”

M’Baku grunts. It is nothing so amazing, he thinks. The wood cones from Hanuman’s gardens, as does all the wood in their weaponry and armor. It is no place for an outsider, king or not. “Don’t fall behind.”

Word has already spread of T’Challa’s arrival. The narrow streets are fuller than usual, windows open overhead and full of curious onlookers. Colorful twists of rope sway overhead, crossing the streets in brightly dyed trails. A few of them are strewn with wooden chimes, sounding gently in the wind.

“Don’t stare,” M’Baku says. “We don’t take kindly to tourists.” He stops at a stall and buys a packet of fried plantains, pressing his money into the stall keeper’s hand when she tries to wave it away. “Here.” He gives T’Challa the packet and tells himself it is only to ward off a stream of unwanted questions.

“So there is tourism, then?” T’Challa immediately asks, utterly disregarding M’Baku’s efforts in preventing this very event. “I would be interested in making introductions with the neighboring-”

“It is a joke,” M’Baku interrupts. He makes no attempt to hide his exasperation. “Surely you’ve heard of a joke. You people are far too serious.” He clicks his tongue and forges deeper into the city streets.

They end up at the fish ponds by the residential district, where fat river fish swim in lazy circles, nipping at drifting wisps of algae. T’Challa buys a bag of feed, bright-eyed with excitement, and insists they take a moment to sit by the pondside.

“This is an activity meant for the children,” M’Baku points out, but he reluctantly accepts a handful of feed when T’Challa tips it over his palm. They sit on the short bridge arching over the pond, legs swinging between the wooden slats of the railing.

“I would be interested in touring your schools. Perhaps there could be a collaboration between our education programs.” T’Challa looks down, his delight evident, as the fish begin nipping at his offerings, splashing beneath their feet.

“The Queen Mother has interesting views on children,” M’Baku murmurs.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

The sky is clear and blue above them, and M’Baku distantly registers the calls of mountain eagles wheeling overhead, searching for prey on the frozen slopes. He feels something similar, closing around him like scaled talons. An inevitability he cannot escape.

“No queen for you?” he asks. He watches the fish stir restlessly in the water, recognizing their shadows now as potential sources of food. “You are of the right age.”

“A queen?” T’Challa sounds bemused. M’Baku dares not look at his face. “No. There is little chance of that.”

“What of the woman?”

“The woman?”

“That River Tribe woman,” M’Baku snaps, annoyed. Surely T’Challa is playing him for a fool. “I liked her. She had some fire in her.”

“Nakia? No, no.” T'Challa shakes his head, his mouth curling wryly. “She is too good for me. Far too selfless. I am undeserving.”

M’Baku laughs at that, incredulous, and T’Challa glances at him. “What, can you not hear yourself?” M’Baku shakes his head. “You are ridiculous.”

“She said the same.” T’Challa frowns down at the bag of feed in his hands, toying absently with the oiled wrapper. “I still am unsure why.”

“Of course you are,” M’Baku mutters.

“Nakia is a good friend to me.” Then, more carefully, “As are you.”

 _Is that what we are,_ M’Baku wants to ask. He throws a handful of feed to the fish instead, a little more forcefully than necessary, and watches them flap greedily to the surface, mouths gaping. Their splashing disrupts the calm surface of the pond, the reflection of the setting sun rippling into golden shards.

“And you?” There is an intent curiosity in T’Challa’s tone now, his gaze heavy and scrutinizing on the side of M’Baku’s face. _Who do you have_ , is the silent question, a query within a query. M’Baku does not answer. Let T’Challa come to his own conclusions, M’Baku owes him nothing.

“You mentioned you didn’t have a father.” The abrupt shift in conversation jostles M’Baku’s resolve, and he is startled enough to look over. T’Challa is still watching him, something of a predator in the brightness of his eyes. Ah, but M’Baku forgets sometimes, that even a panther at rest should not be underestimated.

“Hmm?” M’Baku says. “Did I?”

“You did,” T’Challa says. He seems to have forgotten about their earlier conversation altogether, and M’Baku is not...disappointed. No, not that. T’Challa tips the bag over M’Baku’s palm, filling it with more feed. “I asked my father about it, when I returned from America.” He pauses for a moment, clearly waiting for a response.

M’Baku says nothing. There is a smaller fish, he notices, lingering behind the others. It darts in and out on occasion, but is knocked aside by a larger, stronger fish. He has barely registered it when T’Challa wordlessly aims a handful of feed in its direction.

“He told me,” T’Challa continues, as if the silence never occurred, “that no Jabari lord has a father.”

M’Baku sighs, suddenly tiring of this. Always so _diplomatic_. “If you wanted to meet my children,” he says dryly. “You only needed to ask.” He takes more delight than he should in seeing T’Challa’s startled expression, and he pushes himself up to his feet, dumping the rest of his feed in the pond and brushing it from his palms. “Come, I’ll introduce you.”

“You don’t really have children,” T’Challa says, as he stands. Then, more doubtfully, “Do you?”

“I have six,” M’Baku says, and he grins at the look on T’Challa’s face. “Did your father not tell you?”

“There are many things,” T’Challa says, with a brittleness to his tone, “that my father did not tell me.”

For a moment, M’Baku wonders if he ought to offer some form of sympathy. A hand on the shoulder, perhaps, a few words of comfort. His mouth opens, but he has no words at the ready, and he swallows. The moment passes before he can take further action, and he bites at the inside of his cheek.

Then, “He did tell me you did well in your schooling in America, when you returned. I was glad to hear of it.”

M’Baku runs a hand slowly along the raining, feeling the smooth grain of the wood beneath his palm. He thinks of those long months after T’Challa’s disappearance, of the quietness of their rooms, the emptiness of his small bed.

“It was strange.” It is easier to say now, over twenty years later. “After you left.” He feels T’Challa watching him, and he looks very carefully down into the pond. “If I did well, it was out of necessity.”

“I’m sorry,” T’Challa says. His voice is quiet, kind. It should not feel adequate, and yet it feels more than that. His hand slips over M’Baku’s, his fingers warm and gentle on M’Baku’s knuckles. The instinct to pull away strikes him, then fades almost instantly.

M’Baku grunts, his grip tightening on the railing, and does not move when T’Challa squeezes his hand and leans closer, pressing their arms together. “It was not your fault,” he mutters. “It was a long time ago. We were only children.” The last, he directs at himself. _Let go of this foolishness_.

T’Challa is quiet for a long moment. The tension of the silence mounts, then subsides, and they stand comfortably side by side on the bridge.

“I take it back, then,” T’Challa says lightly. “Consider my apology retracted.”

A surprised laugh splutters out of M’Baku, his shoulders jerking. He struggles to contain himself, and he can only hope his expression is not telling when T’Challa glances up at him.

T’Challa smiles, and all hope is lost.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s finally done, apologies for the wait but it’s HERE

 “Lord M’Baku! Lord M’Baku, is that the-”

“He’s smaller than I thought, huh, pathe-”

“Kaseko! Be respectful-”

“Line up, now, line up. Surely Master Yele has taught you better than this.” M’Baku scowls with mock sternness, and the children scramble into order, jostling into their proper places before him.

“You say this as if you do not corrupt them daily,” Yele says dryly.

“Quiet,” M’Baku tells him, and beside him, T’Challa laughs quietly. “You too, O King, I don’t recall inviting you.”

“But you did,” T’Challa says, a pest to the end. “It would be terrible manners to say otherwise.”

“Terrible manners,” Yele agrees. He is too far for M’Baku to grind his heel against his toes, but that does not keep him from imagining it. He grunts and gestures at the ragged line before them, his children bouncing with poorly concealed impatience. He’ll have to double their drills, if this is how they behave in front of the thrice-damned _king_.

“Kaseko, there, he is the oldest.” Kaseko puffs his skinny chest out, like a plucked rooster, prideful beyond his twelve years.

“Selasi. My newest.” Selasi’s stance wobbles; he has never been M’Baku’s most graceful child, and he sighs inwardly.

“Hayo, Letayi, who are enough evidence to prove that numbers are not always an advantage-”

“Hey!”

“Two _are_ better than one-”

“Oson,” M’Baku continues loudly, over the pitched protests and subsequent yelp of the twins under Yele’s knuckles, and the quiet child bends in an awkward bow, tightening his grip on the hand of the toddler clinging to his side. “And Mobo.”

T’Challa regards them gravely, as if inspecting a line of his own personal guard, and M’Baku looks on, reluctantly amused, as the children subtly straighten beneath his inspection. “They are very impressive,” T’Challa says, clearly fighting back a smile now. How can his children be so impressed with _this_ , M’Baku despairs. “I would’ve expected nothing less of Lord M’Baku’s heirs.”

“ _Heir,”_  Kaseko bursts out, evidently unable to contain himself any longer. “I will be the next Jabari lord.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Kaseko, the staff’s bigger than you are-”

“And I’m bigger than _you,_ damn Hayo-”

“Don’t talk to me like that! Letayi, tell him-”

“Hayo’s right, _we’re_ going to be the heirs because two _are_ better-”

Yele’s staff delivers three rapid taps, and M’Baku sighs at the indignant noises that ensue, waving for T’Challa to follow as he leaves the courtyard. “Do not laugh,” he warns, at the look on T’Challa’s face. “They are usually far better behaved.” It is not quite the truth, but T’Challa has no need of that particular knowledge.

“I’m only thinking,” T’Challa says. “You’ve lied to me.” M’Baku is beginning to wonder if he is somewhat of a mind reader, after all, when T’Challa continues. “You did have a father.”

“I’ve told you that I do not.”

“But you had the previous lord.” T’Challa is watching the path before them, as if the flattened earth holds the most fascinating of secrets. “Fatherhood is not dependent on blood.”

M’Baku is silent for a moment longer. He thinks of Adebiyi’s stern hand, how that same hand was large and warm on his shoulder at times of pride and celebration, the way he had stood by his- no, M’Baku’s- throne and told him it was all right for him to want.

“I suppose so,” M’Baku says, and perhaps T’Challa hears something of his thoughts in his voice. The rest of the walk back to T’Challa’s ship is quiet and uneventful, and M’Baku cannot keep himself from thinking that it is altogether too brief.  

…………………

He tries not to think anything of it, when T’Challa shows up again the following week, and then once more just three days after. It is not the lack of announcement before these visits that bothers him, nor the small gifts T’Challa brings with him each time- a wooden carving of a gorilla curled in sleep, and a thin necklace that smells of the star Birnin Zana sits upon. It is not even the way T’Challa’s brief touches grow more frequent, and more lingering, on M’Baku’s elbow and arm and shoulder and, on one memorable occasion, his waist.

M’Baku is not a fool. He recognizes the signs of an attempted courtship when he sees them, though a part of him maintains that T’Challa could not possibly be so outrageous. Of all the possible candidates in his Golden City and the tribes beyond, surely a king is not so brazen and loose with his responsibilities that he will choose to pursue a rival ruler instead.

A part of him whispers that perhaps T’Challa is no fool, after all, and this is some misguided act of political manipulation.

The rest of him, an unsettlingly large part, recoils at the thought.

No, that is just as foolish as the rest of his thoughts. T’Challa, with a face as open and earnest as the simple gifts he brings in his unadorned palms, could not manage such predictable subterfuge.

He means to turn T’Challa away. He means to every time the royal ship touches down outside his city, a respectful distance from the main gates now. He means to when T’Challa begins walking closer to him than is necessary, so that their arms brush together with each step. He means to every time T’Challa tilts his chin up to meet M’Baku’s gaze, his eyes warm and shockingly affectionate as his mouth twists in wry amusement as something M’Baku has said.

He means to, he means to.

He does not.

A summons arrives, calling him to sit at yet another Council meeting that he intends to ignore, but the elders chide him until he irritably sets out across the plains with a handful of his guard. It has been months now, since the battle here, but every drop of spilled Jabari blood still cries out to him beneath each step.

It is a sobering realization, that their tribes came together out of necessity, in times of conflict and civil unrest. He will turn T’Challa away today, he tells himself resolutely. This...this _sentiment,_  however clumsily forged, is nothing but an indulgence. The time has long passed when he could afford such things.

…………………

The meeting is like any other meeting, and thus M’Baku yawns his way deliberately through it. He tells himself it is not to make T’Challa bite back an exasperated smile, when he happens to glance over from his throne. He is telling himself a lot of things, these days.

“M’Baku,” T’Challa calls after him, afterwards. “Stay a moment.” The other brightly robed tribal heads are making their way out, some on the arms of their successors, others with their heads bent together in conversation. M’Baku grimaces, one foot still in the air, and pivots around with exaggerated stiffness.

“Your Majesty,” he says carefully, looking above T’Challa’s head. It is easier, sometimes, to speak to him without looking.

T’Challa moves closer, hands clasped behind his back, and M’Baku tries not to shift his weight. He wonders if he looks as out of place here as T’Challa does in the mountains, though, as of late, he has begun to look less and less strange there. “You don’t need to call me that, you know,” T’Challa says, amused. “Not when we’re alone.”

Something itches beneath M’Baku’s skin, scratching restlessly, as if wishing to be freed. He swallows and feels distinctly hunted when T’Challa comes to stand before him, close enough that he cannot be ignored.

“Is something bothering you?” T’Challa asks, when M’Baku says nothing. He peers at M’Baku curiously, as if he is something to investigate, some riddle to be solved. “You look troubled.”

M’Baku snorts, despite himself. “Troubled,” he repeats scornfully. “What have I to be troubled about?”

T’Challa gives him a dubious look. “Have you taken ill?” He lifts a hand, clearly with the intention of pressing it to M’Baku’s face like a worrying mother with her ailing child. M’Baku finally remembers how to move his feet, and he nearly trips himself in his haste to step back. His heart pounds, and he cannot help but remember the two of them circling each other in the swirling waters of the falls, the promise of a throne between them.

There is the promise of something else now, but he closes his eyes and turns from it blindly.

“You worry over nothing,” M’Baku says gruffly. He rubs at his beard, then looks at the gleaming floor between his sandaled feet. “If that is all, I should get going.” This time, he makes it as far as the door before T’Challa’s hand catches his elbow.

He spins around, his lips drawing back, and T’Challa releases his grip instantly, his face drawing together in unmistakable hurt. Ah, fuck, but he must know how he looks when he makes an expression like that.

“My apologies,” T’Challa says. “I thought- I did not mean to overstep.” His voice is thick with confusion, and of course it is justified. When has M’Baku ever given him reason to think otherwise? He has been unacceptably weak to let it get this far, to indulge T’Challa in these growing affections without so much as a word of protest. It is as if some part of him wants-

No.

“You surprised me,” M’Baku hears himself say, but no, that is not what he meant to say at all, he should correct himself immediately. Already, he sees T’Challa’s eyes softening, the relief there so blinding that M’Baku aches from seeing it.

“You remind me of when we were children.” T’Challa grins at him, as if this is a pleasant memory he holds. “You would startle easily when your friend dropped notes down over your shoulder in class.”

M’Baku has no memory of this. He is surprised, frankly, that T’Challa does. He has tried so hard to forget his time with T’Challa that year that he has somehow managed to remember nothing else. He grunts in vague acknowledgment, and does not flinch away this time when T’Challa lifts a hand towards him once more. If he flees again with no explanation, T’Challa will only follow; that much has already been made clear.

T’Challa’s palm finds his cheek, warm and light. His thumb slides gently over the shaved skin above M’Baku’s ear, stroking over the rim until M’Baku has to shudder and close his eyes.

“We aren't children anymore,” M’Baku manages, an edge of desperation to his voice. T’Challa is leaning closer, and M’Baku cannot find the strength in himself to stop this. It is like an avalanche, like a wildfire, like the coming of the dawn.

“No,” T’Challa agrees. “We are not.” Their foreheads touch, T’Challa’s face tilted up towards his own. M’Baku nearly pulls away on instinct, his mouth pressing flat in denial, but T’Challa holds him fast with a strength not his own.

“This is unfair,” M’Baku tells him, and T’Challa’s brow creases, his fingers slackening immediately. This will not do, M’Baku thinks abruptly, as sudden as striking lightning. He grabs a handful of T’Challa’s robes without thinking, drags him closer until their chests press together with each breath. His hand is caught between them now, and he feels T’Challa’s heartbeat pounding against his knuckles, as fast and hard as his own. Fuck, what is he doing, what is he doing-

T’Challa’s arm lifts slowly to wrap around his shoulders, and M’Baku is twelve years old again, afraid and shaking in the dark. He closes his eyes, his breaths coming heavily, and he nearly misses the first touch T’Challa presses to his face, his lips soft and chaste against M’Baku’s forehead.

“It's all right,” T’Challa murmurs, his voice pitched low as he kisses M’Baku’s cheeks, first the right and then the left. He sounds nothing like he did as a child, and yet.

And yet.

“Don't say that,” M’Baku says, hating the helplessness in his own voice. Something uproots within him with a great wrench, dislodging his heart, his breath, his very being. His hands are shaking, and T’Challa’s fingers close over them. “You cannot know that, you never could-”

He opens his eyes when T’Challa kisses him properly, his mouth softer than M’Baku has ever dared to imagine. He sees that T’Challa’s eyes are closed, and it is easier this way. Easier for M’Baku to shudder and allow T’Challa to move deeper within him, to claw into his chest and reside in the hollow space there.

M’Baku makes a sound that he hardly recognizes as his own, and T’Challa holds him closer, makes a rumbling noise in return as he kisses M’Baku again and again, as if he cannot get enough of it, of M’Baku.

It is impossibly good, it is unbearably so.

M'Baku pushes T’Challa back, his gasp harsh and loud in the sudden space between them. T'Challa looks at him, wounded, his mouth swollen and damp and _fuck,_ M’Baku has never wanted anything more than to pull him close again.

“Stop this,” he says. He has finally found it in himself, those two decisive words. He takes a step back, collecting the ragged edges of his dignity back around him, and resists the urge to press his fingers to his mouth. He can still feel T’Challa there, a persistent and lingering warmth that burns and burns. “Stop this, T’Challa. What good could come of it?”

T’Challa is the king, after all. He is the king and he will always be, and M’Baku cannot allow himself to play the role of the lovestruck fool reaching for the moon on the surface of a pond. It is always only a reflection, in the end.

Better to look away now and forget he ever saw it.

“What good-” T’Challa repeats, his brow furrowed. He might have said more, but the doors burst open behind them, the princess tripping through in a flurry of elbows and excitement.

“Brother! Brother, you should've _told_ me you'd still be here, I thought the meeting ended ages ago-” she cuts off abruptly, perhaps noticing how closely they stand, how stiffly M’Baku holds himself.

M’Baku looks down at her, crosses his arms across his chest and draws himself up to his full height.

Shuri remains unimpressed, and he remembers now that she is sixteen, after all.

“Lord M’Baku,” she says slowly. Her eyes flick from him to her brother, then back again just as quickly. “My apologies- for the interruption. That is, it _was_ an interruption, wasn't it?”

“Shuri,” T’Challa says, low and weary.

“I'll just go then, no worries.” She is already backing towards the door, her tablet clutched to her chest and eyes dancing. “Don’t stop on my account.”

“No.” M’Baku has had enough. His heart strains in his chest, tight and trapped, and he cannot bring himself to look at T’Challa. If he does, he will be tempted to do something foolish, like pull him close again and never let go. “We are finished here.”

“Oh-” Shuri begins, as he strides past her. “Should I not have…” M’Baku hears, as he shoulders open the doors, and they close behind him on the sound of T’Challa’s sigh.

…………………

M’Baku does not sulk. He _broods_ , yes, for the better part of a day, pacing his golden chambers. He tries not to resent the sleek decor or the wide window overlooking the city, with its busy vehicles and blinding colors. It is not their fault, after all, that they remind him of T’Challa. But he does not sulk.

He shouldn’t have allowed T’Challa to touch him like that, to look at him like that. He cannot remove the memories, as hard as he tries. He cannot forget the feeling of _yes, yes, this is right_ at the press of T’Challa’s lips. Perhaps it is something he has been longing for all this time, before he even knew the meaning of want. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, there are a million things that could have been, might still be, but he cannot allow himself to think of them.

What kind of a ruler can allow himself to be so swayed by the past, too lost in something as foolish as _this_ to forget he is a ruler at all? He is a king, in his own right, if not of his people then certainly of himself, and T’Challa the army besieging his kingdom.

There is a series of knocks on his door, brisk and purposeful. It will be Bayode, M’Baku thinks, come to announce that the preparations for their return are complete. He shakes off the heavy fog of his thoughts and crosses the room, pressing his palm to the lock panel to open the door.

It is not Bayode.

“Oh, it’s you,” M’Baku says, and he closes the door again. A hand shoots out before he can complete the action, catching the edge of the door and keeping it open with an unreasonable strength. T’Challa looks back at him, one eye and cheek visible in the narrow gap between the door and the frame. There is an unhappy turn to the corner of his mouth, his lip swollen as if he has been worrying it with his teeth. M’Baku jerks his eyes up, berating himself silently.

“Can we speak?” T’Challa asks. His voice is low, plaintive.

“I have nothing to say,” M’Baku says stiffly. This is not true, he thinks, before he can silence himself. _Shut up, fool, there is nothing that can be said._

“Then will you listen?” T’Challa peers at him, his eye wide and earnest and unfairly damp. M’Baku feels as if he is drowning a kitten.

He sighs and relaxes his grip on the door, but does not move from the doorway. Let T’Challa say what he has come here to say, and then he will send him away and everything will be as it ought to be.

T’Challa is quiet at first, until M’Baku begins to wonder if he has forgotten his original purpose, and then he speaks.

“I must apologize,” T’Challa begins. “I have presumed...I believed that we were of the same mind. Clearly, I was wrong.” He pauses, and M’Baku takes an uncomfortable breath. He did not expect apologies from T’Challa, and there is a wrongness to it now that he instinctively wants to protest.

“You would not have my friendship, when we were young.” T’Challa continues quietly. There is an old sadness there, a buried edge of hurt, and M’Baku’s chest clenches tight at the sound. “And now, now you will refuse me again.” A pause. Then, unevenly, “If my attentions are so undesirable, I will cease to-”

“ _No._ ” The response bursts from him, rough with shock, and M’Baku curses himself silently. He said he would only listen, did he not? “No, it is not...it is not that.”

The pause that follows is as telling as a laden confession. M’Baku surreptitiously tests the give of the door, but T’Challa’s grip remains immovable. He watches T’Challa’s brow furrow with a sense of doom, sensing the confusion, the contemplation, the spreading comprehension.

“Leave me,” M’Baku says, in a final desperate attempt at escape. He can feel himself giving in, thin ice cracking around his feet.

“If you are afraid that-”

“I am not _afraid._ ” He snarls the words, raw and harsh. They are true, because they must be. He is lord of the Jabari, and he is not afraid of anything, least of all this, this-

“Then don’t run,” T’Challa says softly. A selfish plea, though he doesn't know it. He cannot possibly. His hand is suddenly tight around M’Baku’s wrist, anchoring him in place, in this moment. M’Baku is dizzy with his nearness.

This is foolish, yes; in a million ways. But he wants, _gods_ , he wants, and perhaps…

Perhaps a lifetime of foolishness is not so bad.

He does not know if it is his hand who draws T’Challa forward, or if it is T’Challa himself who pushes in. The door hisses shut behind him and locks with a definitive click, and M’Baku cannot help the thrill of triumph that sings within him at the sound.

“If you don’t want this,” T’Challa says, his breath hot and ragged against M’Baku’s cheek, “you will tell me now. Or-”

M’Baku kisses him. It is just as good as the first, and he finds it as terrifying as it is exhilarating. Another kiss like this, and he will never refuse T’Challa anything again. “Or what?” he asks, afterwards, when T’Challa is panting and clutching at his arms.

There is more than a hint of the panther in the way T’Challa’s teeth catch at his ear, the ghost of a growl rumbling from his throat as he surges forward, twisting to corner M’Baku against the wall. “Or I will be lost, if you turn me away again,” he says, the words mouthed roughly beneath M’Baku’s jaw. It sends a wild shiver through him, one that could not have possibly gone unnoticed.

“If you are lost, then I will find you,” M’Baku says nonsensically, and his voice does not sound like his own. Perhaps there is a little of the panther in him, as well. “Simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” T’Challa echoes. He kisses M’Baku again, slow and marveling, licking deeper until M’Baku’s tongue burns and his gut begins to tighten. T’Challa kisses like he fights, tactical and unrelenting. His hands pluck at the ties of M’Baku’s leather armor, sending the pieces tumbling to the shining floor.

“We do not have to,” T’Challa murmurs, just when M’Baku thinks he has reached the end of his silliness. His touches turn hesitant, his hands settling carefully on M’Baku’s waist. “I did not- this was not in my plans. I would court you again, behave accordingly-”

M’Baku snorts, a sort of panic building in him now. Surely he would not stop _now-_  if he does, M’Baku thinks he will flee right out the window and make his escape back to the mountains. “Ridiculous,” he says. “Your _plans._ Your _courting._ ” He tugs at T’Challa’s robes, trying to find a clasp somewhere in the seamless fabric. “You, coming here in the dead of the night, sneaking around like this is some sordid teenage affair-”

“Teenage-” T’Challa begins, indignant.

“ _Do not have to_ ,” M’Baku mimics, pitching his voice high to see T’Challa’s mouth pout in annoyance. “Ridiculous,” he says again, and he finally manages to loosen the damn robes. They fall silently to the floor, pooling around T’Challa’s ankles, and M’Baku swallows hard.

“Fuck,” he says distinctly. “Do you always walk around like this?”

T’Challa frowns, and the look is so childishly irked that M’Baku feels a desperate need to laugh. “Is there something wrong with the way I dress?” There is something in the way he says it that implies past ridicule in the same vein. He sets his hands on his hips, accentuating the smooth lines of muscle, the dark scrap of- surely that cannot be considered _clothing_ \- fabric that does little to conceal what strains beneath, and M’Baku suddenly finds nothing funny at all about the situation.

“Fuck,” M’Baku repeats, quieter now. He reaches out, then freezes, some unconscious thread of denial locking him tightly in place. T’Challa looks down at his outstretched hand for a moment, then steps forward, and M’Baku’s breath hisses out in a slow, wondering exhale at the heat of him beneath his fingers.

“You are obscene,” he comments, as evenly as he can manage, and he squeezes T’Challa’s cock slowly, admiring the violet sheen of fabric slipping over it.

T’Challa shivers, a slow tremble that M’Baku feels every inch of, and shrugs a bare shoulder. “Probably. But you are more so.”

M’Baku wonders if he should be offended. At the moment, he cannot bring himself to be anything but awed.

“Give me your hand,” M’Baku says brusquely, before he can lose his nerve, and he takes T’Challa’s fingers, sucks two of them knuckle deep into his mouth.

T’Challa makes a strangled sound, his fingertips twitching against M’Baku’s tongue. “I did not expect this of you,” he confesses. He strokes the inside of M’Baku’s cheek with his fingertips, eyes darkening. “Have you been thinking of this?”

In truth, M’Baku has not, but now it is all he can think of. He slides his hand down T’Challa’s belly and shoves the flimsy excuse for an undergarment aside, wrapping his fingers around T’Challa’s cock. It fits well there, he thinks stupidly. This has made him stupid, and even more so for liking it. He bites lightly at T’Challa’s knuckles, and T’Challa’s mouth falls open slightly, his pink tongue just visible between his teeth.

The bed is higher than he is used to, and he grunts when T’Challa finally backs him into it, tipping back to sprawl on his elbows. “Oh,” he says, when T’Challa follows, his shoulders fitting between the careless sprawl of M’Baku’s legs. “ _Oh._ ”

“Is this all right?” The words fall out of T’Challa without an ounce of grace. He looks as wild as M’Baku has ever seen him, his eyes blown dark and hazy, his breath hot and unsteady on M’Baku’s thigh. “Say something.”

M’Baku’s cock gives an undeniable twitch at the look in his eyes, and he wishes briefly to die when T’Challa glances down at it. “Less talk,” he barks, wishing he can soften any aspect of himself, wondering how T’Challa finds being reprimanded while fucking. He reaches down and catches his own knee, holding himself open. His face is furiously hot.

T’Challa, mercifully, says nothing. There is an unspoken gratitude in the way he bends his head to kiss at the tip of M’Baku’s cock, so reverent that M’Baku’s groan is from as much embarrassment as pleasure. The next sound he makes, as T’Challa slowly slides his cock down his throat, is significantly more of the latter.

Hanuman be _damned_ , there is nothing stately about the way T’Challa takes him. He pulls off of M’Baku with a wet, lewd sound, presses his tongue maddeningly against the slit, and swallows him again in one, seamless movement. M’Baku claws at the sheets, then at himself, his legs aching at the strain, and he holds back his moans until he can do so no longer.

“You-” T’Challa does something unspeakable with his tongue, his spit dripping down and slicking the fingers he has pressed to the base of M’Baku’s cock. “Damn you, where did you even-” M’Baku chokes when T’Challa glances up at him, his mouth tightening in the intention of a smirk.

“Fuck,” M’Baku says uselessly. His knees tremble, his hands slipping on his own skin as he tries to hold himself in place. “ _Fuck,_ T’Challa-” He will be embarrassed, later, when he remembers how his voice trembles in pitch, little more than a gasp of breath.

T’Challa works him patiently, his wet knuckles pressing relentlessly behind M’Baku’s balls, and M’Baku chokes out a broken groan as he spills with a helpless jolt.

His hips twitch up, bruising themselves beneath T’Challa’s fingers, and he cries out again as T’Challa sucks the release from him, unsatisfied until M’Baku finds himself on the verge of begging, his cock softening and slipping out over T’Challa’s swollen bottom lip. It leaves a thin trail of spit and come, and he has to close his eyes at the sight of T’Challa’s tongue flicking out to catch it.

There is a flickering fire within him, still, despite T’Challa’s best efforts, and he wonders if he is going mad, after all. Perhaps this is all a fevered dream, a phantom of the summer nights. T’Challa looks up at him, his eyes dazed and dark, an altogether too smug lift to his glistening mouth.

“You…” M’Baku cannot manage much more. “Come- yes, come _here_ , let me have you.” He tugs at T’Challa’s shoulder, when it seems like T’Challa is happy to do nothing more than sprawl between his legs in cat-like contentment for the rest of the night, and T’Challa comes easily enough.

He leans over M’Baku, a knee between his thighs and hands braced on either side of M’Baku’s head, and he makes a quivering, broken sound when M’Baku takes him in hand. Gods, he’s so hard that he drips with it, hot and slick in M’Baku’s grip as he works out the proper angle.

“M’Baku,” T’Challa says, then again, this time gasped into the side of M’Baku’s throat. His arms tremble when M’Baku tells him exactly where he wants this cock the next time they come together, and his fingernails claw matching trails to the ink on M’Baku’s shoulders and chest when he finally jerks into M’Baku’s hand and grows still.

The fever is more human now in the breathless moments that follow, when T’Challa rolls against his side and they both watch the lights dim behind the dark ceiling. M’Baku has yet to regain the ability to think, and he is almost relieved by it.

He feels as if something has ended, somewhere in the foggy depths of his memory, and he thinks of the tears he shed on a riverbank so many years ago, when he kissed a boy with eyes so very familiar.

“I think I have loved you for years,” T’Challa murmurs, low and thoughtful against his shoulder. It takes him a moment to register the words, and he frowns.

“Don't do that.”

“What, say I love you?” T’Challa’s eyebrows lift effortlessly, somehow managing to make him look even younger. “Surely you will not deny me this _now._ ”

“You say it so damn easily,” M’Baku mutters, disgruntled. “Makes me feel like an idiot.” Was it that simple all along, he wonders? It cannot be. T’Challa simply makes the most monumental of achievements appear mundane.

T'Challa opens his mouth, and M’Baku holds up a warning finger. “Don’t.” T'Challa smiles instead, and M’Baku kisses him, long and slow. He is becoming more accustomed to it now, at wringing the faltering breaths and soft noises from T’Challa until he yields. He hopes to never grow out of practice.

“Don’t you disappear again,” M’Baku murmurs, with the last ounce of his willpower. In his dreams, sometimes, he still sees an empty bed, the sheets tucked tightly and an abandoned schooldesk left unoccupied.

T’Challa does not.

**Author's Note:**

> Send requests and yell with me on tumblr @mangopuffs  
> Twitter: @_mangochi


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